In the month of Maju I did not rest. Well, actually it is the month of Maia goddess of fertility, but Maju may be related to the maypole celebrations traditional in many parts of Europe, not in vain the Basque God Maju or Sugaar and his consort and most Goddess Mari recreate the World every Friday night by means of sex, of which is said that the fertilizing storms are born. Even if the corresponding ritual orgies are not anymore performed, thanks to Christian persecutions, I guess that there is still enough sex through the World to keep the wheel running.

But remember that Basque legend also says that the World will come to its end when crossroads are everywhere. Look around you and despair, ye mortal.

Was I fertile this month of fertility? I'm not sure but we did learn in that date that Neanderthals and our kin were inter-fertile indeed. And this is the likely most important single news of the year, at least in the fields of genetics and prehistory.

In the month of Juno, jealous Olympian wife, torturer of Io and destroyer of mighty Troy, I was really overwhelmed by the massacre of peace activists on the Mavi Marmara by Zionist commandos. But there was some other materials flowing later in the month as well.

Oddly enough, some were precisely about Jewish genetics:

Jews are Phoenicians, Palestinians are Jews, based on Behar 2010, came to confirm my suspicions about modern Western Jews having originated not in Palestine but in the Hellenistic Diaspora. This is a suspicion I had since long before and that was reignited earlier that month by another paper by Atzmon, discussed in a single article, where I also dealt with Basque genetics.

In the seventh month... oops the ninth, what were Romans thinking when they chose this name? They could count in spite of those horrible Roman numerals, believe me, just that they began the year in March... until they decided to do otherwise.

We got confirmation that the chimpanzee-bonobo split must be moved back to 1.3 million years, what in turn affects the Pan-Homo divergence age, which is of (at least) 8 million years (and not those absurd figures you may read around of 5-7 million years). This has important implications when considering the molecular clock (or as someone said: molecular compass), implications that are often ignored, producing absurd misunderstandings.

Again we got scientific news (that other scientists insist in ignoring) about the actual age of the Pan-Homo split, which is c. 8 million years ago, not less. This allows Salanthropus Tchadiensis, Toumaï (left), likely to be in our genealogical tree.

In a quite bad week overall, I was for the first time in my almost four year-long history of blogger, suddenly deprived of my Google account altogether. Luckily I could recover it later but all looked pretty bad, automated, impersonal and wrong... so I am considering migrating to Wordpress.

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Link: A history of four scientists' fight against harassment in fieldwork
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Kayla Webley Adler of *Marie Claire* magazine has just published an article
recounting the history of the SAFE13 study about sexual harassment and
assaul...